Top 10 datacentre stories of 2017

Over the course of 2017, we saw hyperscale cloud giants continuing to invest in their UK presence, as well as Apple’s ongoing planning permission delays in Ireland and the disruption caused by the datacentre downtime from British Airways

Much of the datacentre news landscape in 2017 centred on the activities of the hyperscale cloud giants, as they rush to build out their facilities in response to the growing demand for their services worldwide.

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It is this trend that saw Norway and Sweden ramp up their efforts to position their respective countries as a good economic fit for firms that need to rapidly expand their capacity, while remaining mindful of the environmental implications of their growth.

Some of the stories also mark a continuation of some of the trends seen in the datacentre sector over the course of 2016, with the hyperscale cloud giants continuing to invest in building out their UK presence, and – in turn – fuelling demand for colocation capacity in the capital.

While datacentre downtime remains an all too common problem in the IT world, few incidents caused as much disruption as the two-day outage suffered by British Airways over the May 2017 Bank Holiday weekend.

The ongoing saga over whether or not Apple should be granted permission to build a datacentre in Athenry, County Galway, has shown no signs of reaching a resolution this year, as the objectors to the project explore every legal avenue available to them to protest against the project.

Meanwhile, the Irish government vowed earlier this year to explore the possibility of reforming the country’s planning laws to prevent other technology giants running into difficulties when seeking to build out their datacentre presence in Ireland.

Startup Kolos went public in August 2017 with auspicious plans to build a four-storey, 600,000m2 datacentre in the Norwegian town of Ballangen that it claims – on completion – will be the biggest server farm in the world.

While some focused on building the biggest datacentres in the world, the city of Stockholm set its sights on creating a renewably powered datacentre hub where the waste heat generated by the facilities located there will be used to heat nearby homes.

Several months after Microsoft and Amazon went live with their UK datacentres, search giant Google entered the fray in July 2017, promising users low-latency connections to locally hosted versions of its core cloud infrastructure and analytics products.

The datacentre industry’s energy usage patterns are under constant scrutiny, but the backup fuel supplies many operators have stowed away have clearly caught the eye of utility providers, including British Gas.

The company set out its vision – in February 2017 – to get some of the UK’s biggest energy users (with the datacentre community among them) to consider making greater use of their on-site, backup power supplies to reduce their reliance (at peak times) on the National Grid.

The idea prompted a sizeable amount of industry debate, with many market watchers querying how willing the traditionally risk-adverse datacentre community would be to handover access to their backup generators, regardless of how good for the environment the move may be.

The outcome of the June 2016 European Referendum vote prompted a lot of speculation from tech industry watchers about how the decision to exit the European Union (EU) will affect demand for UK-based datacentre space in the years to come.

According to CBRE’s 2017 series of quarterly assessment of how demand for colocation is faring in London, all the signs seem to suggest the prospect of Brexit is not causing demand for datacentre space in the capital to soften.

Many of the so-called legacy hardware giants have seen their financial results adversely affected by enterprises moving away from running their own private datacentres, and lifting and shifting their applications and IT workloads to the cloud.

Others have seen the trend benefit their bottom line, as their technologies are being keenly adopted by the hyperscale cloud community as they race to kit out their public cloud datacentres and ensure they have sufficient capacity to meet enterprise demand.

This trend is being attributed to hyperscale cloud suppliers opting for custom-built, ODM-produced hardware in their datacentres for cost, performance and agility reasons, rather than off-the-shelf kit from the major tier-one suppliers.

The social media giant is an example of an organisation who has opted out of using the technologies on offer from tier one suppliers, and is instead championing the use of the 21-inch servers offered by the Open Compute Project (OCP) for performance, cost and interoperability purposes.

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